M.2 NVMe as boot drive?

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Greenadine

New Member
I am currently on the lookout for a new boot drive since my current 60gb SSD is full, and it's quite annoying how it doesn't want to run certain things because it is full, as well as not being able to update my Windows anymore.

I've been looking around for possibly using an M.2 NVMe SSD as boot drive, but some say it has problems with booting up a system corrrectly, but some also say it's fine. Now I am not sure to get a standard SSD, the Samsung 850 EVO 250GB, or an M.2 NVMe SSD, the Samsung 960 EVO 250GB.

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge about this?
 
Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
This all depends on your motherboard and if there was a BIOS rev. that supported boot from M.2 and if hardware was capable of using it as boot drive.

Many boards also, when you install an M.2, will sacrifice the use of 1 or more sata ports, for example - so keep that in mind, (motherboard specific / check your manual)

I had to do a BIOS flash and install Samsung software but I run NVME M.2 on both my PC and notebook as boot drives - and they kick ass!

EDIT: I'm trying to look into the details of your board, and while it lists Key type M.2 for storage usage, it doesn't mention boot capability nor do I see any capability for nvme drives in the listed BIOS revisions
 
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Intel_man

Intel_man

VIP Member
from block diagrams, it looks like NVME support on the Ryzen platform comes directly from the CPU and not the mobo.

There's others from other forums with the same motherboard and does boot with nvme m.2 drives. Albeit glitchy from unstable BIOS versions, but it boots.
 
Geoff

Geoff

VIP Member
I have a 500GB Samsung 960 EVO M.2 drive as my boot drive. I had no issues with drivers as a standalone, only when trying to RAID them.
 
G

Greenadine

New Member
Geoff said:
I have a 500GB Samsung 960 EVO M.2 drive as my boot drive. I had no issues with drivers as a standalone, only when trying to RAID them.
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Do you notice any improvements of performance in comparison of using a normal SSD as boot drive?

And are there any special actions I have to do to make an M.2 work as boot drive? I've never changed my boot drive, let alone change it to an M.2.
 
Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
M.2 nvme is like 6x faster... 500-550mb/sec compared to 3500 and 1200 read/write on a 960 pro for example..

No comparison between sata3 and new nvme m.2
 
Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
Well, depends what kinda things you do, but overall system boots faster, programs load faster, games load faster, office productivity seems to be improved in heavy excel docs and power point stuff.

Definite improvement in snappiness of Photoshop and Illustrator...and in general searching tasks and scans are faster.
 
Intel_man

Intel_man

VIP Member
Latency in nvme drives are about 10 times lower. Sustained random read/writes are higher. Windows is not likely to boot any faster, but certain programs will benefit from it. Current games doesn't seem to load any faster as well.
 
Geoff

Geoff

VIP Member
Greenadine said:
I guess I want to know if there's be any improvements in performance in comparison to using an M.2 NVMe SSD instead of a standard SSD.
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Boot times are the same more or less, the real improvement is when transferring large files around the drive. I also got it just to say I had it :p
 
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